Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that are currently shaping our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author, activist, and host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XM's Urban View,

Channel 126. In our last segment, we looked at some of the historical roots of anti-black groups

like Moms for Liberty and their impact on education for our kids.

Now, I've frequently written about the anti-black discrimination that our children face in

schools, whether they are looking at suspension rates that are disproportionate for doing

things like wearing ethnically black hairstyles to school, or when they are reprimanded

for insubordination simply because they show up to school in black bodies using black

cultural mannerisms and expressions. I've written about students like Tiana Parker. This was a black

student who was kicked out of school because she was wearing her natural hair.

I've criticized schools like the Lorraine Horizon School, which was an integrated school that

banned afros and small twisted braids without making any similar sort of corrections or

rules for white children and their hairstyles. And I have heavily criticized even HBCUs,

historically black colleges and universities like Hampton University,

for supporting anti-blackness by enforcing a ban against natural hairstyles

and their business programs.

If you're paying attention here,

you get the sense that there are a lot of rules that our children are subjected to

in schools that don't really have anything to do with education, but have more to do with how

they are showing up in the school. And that exists whether they're going to predominantly white

schools or schools that are historically designed to meet our specific needs like HBCUs.

But as I wrote a few years ago in an article about one student who was being videotaped

...